My Stand

I wrote this to a fellow blogger, it sums up much of how I feel about dogma and religion.

Once G-d and man walked together in perfect understanding and harmony. Alas until man invented and began to worship religion,
ever since G-d has had to take a back seat to man's dogma, as we murdered and made war over our idolatrous pagan differences. Deaths as a result of human ideologies have numbered in the hundreds of millions.

G-d does not endorse religion, He tolerates it for our sake. It is only the nature of what that is in your heart the very essence of your soul, that is of G-d's concern. G-d is in and all around us, if but only we could see. No matter in what tradition or religion you may find yourself; G-d knows all those who are His.

Love is all you need.

Some of you may wonder why I write God as G-d? It is out of respect for my friends who feel they must write it that way.

Judaism does not prohibit writing the Name of God per se; it prohibits only erasing or defacing a Name of God. However, observant Jews avoid writing any Name of God casually because of the risk that the written Name might later be defaced, obliterated or destroyed accidentally or by one who does not know better.

The commandment not to erase or deface the name of God comes from Deut. 12:3. In that passage, the people are commanded that when they take over the promised land, they should destroy all things related to the idolatrous religions of that region, and should utterly destroy the names of the local deities. Immediately afterwards, we are commanded not to do the same to our God. From this, the rabbis inferred that we are commanded not to destroy any holy thing, and not to erase or deface a Name of God.

It is worth noting that this prohibition against erasing or defacing Names of God applies only to Names that are written in some kind of permanent form, and recent rabbinical decisions have held that writing on a computer is not a permanent form, thus it is not a violation to type God's Name into a computer and then backspace over it or cut and paste it, or copy and delete files with God's Name in them. However, once you print the document out, it becomes a permanent form. That is why observant Jews avoid writing a Name of God on web sites like this one or in newsgroup messages: because there is a risk that someone else will print it out and deface it.

The earliest written form of the Germanic word god comes from the 6th century Christian Codex Argenteus. My question is; why do my brothers, take the word so seriously, or bother to use it, when they have so many other more proper names for God? The most important name of God in Judaism is the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God. This name is first mentioned in the book of Genesis and is usually translated by the Christians as 'the Lord'. Because Jews have, for a long period of time, considered it blasphemy to pronounce, the correct pronunciation of this name has been forgotten. WHAT?? See what too much religion can do! How embarrassing it would be, if I forgot the name of my father, or mother.









All truly wise thoughts have been thoughts already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe